Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Paolo Sorrentino | Youth

returning to life

by
Douglas Messerli

Paolo
Sorrentino (writer and director) Youth /
2015

Somewhat like
his previous own film, The Great Beauty,
Paolo Sorrentino’s new work, Youth is,
in fact, a thing of great beauty that takes us on a meditation of an older man
observing the pandered young and old among us. And in that voyage, we are
seduced—very much the way Federico Fellini used to seduce us—by the hedonism
and perversity of the rich and famous. Films such as Youth and Fellini’s 8 1/2, which
Sorrentino references in this work, may seem like grandly absurd satires, but
we know that they are also based on some truth about the way their gilded,
grand figures have actually lived their lives.

Filming centrally at Switzerland’s Hotel
Schatzalp—the location also of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—the director calls up not only the glorious
pre-war remnants of the belle epoque,
but purposely references the Roman spas of Fellini’s post-World War II work, in
which the resort visitors daily marched to the music of daily baths, mud-baths,
and massages, while nightly being wined, dined, and entertained by singers,
clowns, choruses, and magic acts. The general age of the decaying, overweight
pilgrims is ancient, and the place literally drips with incapacitation and
ennui; the few youthful denizens, Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea), Jimmy
Tree (Paul Dano), a Johnny Depp-like actor who has gained fame less for his
well-acted characterizations than for his role as a heavily costumed robot, and
two precocious children, a young film-loving girl and a violin-playing boy who,
obviously, have already been so pampered that in a few years it will be hard to
tell them from their elders.

Like Fellini’s script-stalled film
director played by Marcello Mastroianni, Youth’s
reportedly talented filmmaker, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), has brought his
whole writing staff with him to finish up the script of what he proclaims will
be his masterpiece. And, as he annually has throughout most of his life,
Boyle’s friend, the great composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine), has returned
to the hotel to cleanse himself and get an annual checkup.

Ballinger’s personal secretary-daughter,
Lena (Rachel Weisz) is married to Boyle’s son Julian (Ed Stoppard), who early
on in the film, breaks up with Lena in order to run off with the real-life pop
singer, Paloma Faith, who, although lacking any of Lena’s dark beauty is, he
informs us, “great in bed.”

If Boyle is still determined to work, even
as it becomes apparent that his masterpiece is an empty-headed piece of
nonsense, Ballinger is insistent on gradually removing himself from life. The
film begins with a visit to him from Queen Elizabeth’s envoys, requesting that
he conduct a performance of his beloved “Simple Songs” on the occasion of
Prince Philip’s birthday.

For “personal reasons” Ballinger plays
Bartleby to their requests, repeating again and again that he “prefers not.” In
fact Ballinger has become a kind of Bartleby, preferring not do much of
anything, including writing his memoirs—desperately wanted by a European
publisher—or, when Lena lashes out at him after she has been jilted, to face up
to his past, wherein, from his daughter’s viewpoint, he has basically abandoned
both mother and child for his career and other romantic infatuations with both
other women and men (reminding one a bit of elements of composer-conductor
Leonard Bernstein’s life). He is “apathetic” as Lena describes him, which, we
quickly perceive, might describe nearly all those visiting this outrageously
expensive retreat, each of them, in one sense or another, running away or
escaping from the truths of their lives.

The problem is that once Sorrentino
establishes this he seems at a loss himself where to take his own piece of
cinema. It may be fascinating and even fun for a short while to see these
extravagantly blessed beings commiserating for their down-on-their-luck
feelings and stewing recriminations, but in a short while it becomes absolutely
maddening, as if we were watching a group of elderly millionaires sitting in
the corner to cry their eyes out. True, these highly successful gripers do
their gripping often with a high dose of wit; and we all recognize that, in
truth, they lived out their fabled existences not so very differently from most
of us, full of clumsy sloppiness. But daily interchanges about how much they
have been able to piss each morning quickly turns into what might have been a
quick-floating joke into a yawn-inducing arch of the eye-lid. And no matter how
Sorrentino attempts through Boyle’s daily attempts to creatively spur on his
team with group hugs and Ballinger’s private compositions among the cows, the
film can’t quite determine whether or not it wants to be a satire or a sad
meditation upon the arts and what it means to grow older.

As it is, it remains caught in between.
And the sad comic duo at film’s center, in their increasing listlessness and
voyeurism, lose our interest. Despite the presence, at moments, of the god-like
appearance in the totally undressed Miss Universe and the inexplicable dressing
up of disaffected robot actor as Hitler—perhaps in an attempt to try-out his
next character in what will be a German-made movie—we quickly begin to long to leave
this moribund costume-drama behind.

Only when the director calls out—a bit
like a summoning of the Eumenides—a frightfully made-up aged Jane Fonda as
Boyle’s great actress-love Brenda Morel does the film begin to wake up.

She has, as she puts it, “trotted her ass
from LA to Europe” in order to tell her former mentor that he is a has-been
director who she should no longer be allowed to make another film, and that she
has no intention of appearing in his great final “testament.” Besides she’ll make
more money playing in a Mexican soap opera, enough to pay off her debts and buy
a house in Miami. In an over-the-top, bravura performance Fonda so clearly lays
out the situation of both Boyle’s personal failures and the problem with the
film, that the director—after another unfruitful conversation with Ballinger,
wherein he explains why he cannot abandon his art as his friend appears to
have—he suddenly jumps over the alpine-high balcony to his death. For Boyle, it
appears, emotion is everything!

In the meantime, we have discerned that
the reason why Ballinger will not perform his “Simple Songs” (a momentous work
composed just for this film by Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer David
Lang) is that he wrote it for and it was sung by only his wife—a woman, now
living in Venice, who, he explains, can no longer sing.

Finally released from the retreat,
Ballinger alone must face up to his own youth, to the past that he has refused
to embrace throughout the story. Returning to Venice, he brings flowers to his
incarcerated wife, who sits throughout his gentle conversation—during which he
calls up a deeply loving life between the two of them, despite everything,that his daughter might never have
imagined—staring out the window with open mouth, obviously suffering from
severe Alzheimer’s or dementia.

The sadness of their life, as well as the
beauty of it, is summed up, finally, in a performance of his “Simple Songs,” in
concert, after all, before the Queen and Prince, sung by soprano Sumi Jo and
violinist Viktoria Mullova with BBC Concert Orchestra. The simple beauty of
that music restores much of the energy previously missing from this film, and stunningly
explains its previous lethargy. Yet Sorrentino’s determination to visually
finalize some scenes back at the retreat and depict the mid-air breakdown of
Brenda Morel during the performance sentimentalizes everything, while the
“simple” presentation of music surely might have been expression of the central
character’s sorrow and redemption enough.